Thursday, August 20, 2015

A Gambler’s supper


Given a choice, I would like to dig my four fingers into one of those delicious meals with curries, rice and other side dishes. But life doesn’t always provide choices as most of my lunch ends being sandwiches while the car being the dining room.
After today’s lunch, I thought of digging a bit into the history of this food keeping many like me up and running.

There lived a recklessly extravagant British statesman called Jon Montagu (1718 – 1792) in south east of England in the eighteenth century. He was the fourth Earl of Sandwich, a historic town and civil parish on the river Stour and notorious as a gambler.
Montagu had invented this bread-enclosed convenience food known as the "sandwich", so that he would not have to leave his gaming table to take supper.

The concept is this food is wonderfully simple: a delicate finger food served between two slices of bread. People of the Mediterranean and Greece are known to have this culinary concept in practice since ancient times and Montagu is thought to have picked it up during one of his trips.
Early reference of sandwich is found in the 1760 that during the initial days they were assumed to food consumed primarily by the masculine gender during late night parties and drinking sessions.

The general public of England and rest of the world got indoctrinated with the passage of time.



For Reference: Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, Solomon H. Katz, editor, William Woys Weaver, assoicate editor [Charles Scribner's Sons:New York] 2003, Volume 3 (p. 235-6)

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